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Tag Archives: 1960s

Did you know that Hennepin History Museum is home to an extensive historic cookbook collection? The collection includes dozens of community cookbooks created by local churches, hospitals, schools, businesses, and other organizations, as well as cookbooks by local authors or featuring local restaurants and advertising cookbooks or recipe booklets distributed by Hennepin County companies.

Included in this cookbook collection is an extensive run of General Mills and Pillsbury cookbooks, including this first edition of Betty Crocker’s Pie and Pastry Cookbook. Cookbooks like this had a national appeal; you were as likely to find it on the shelf of a resident in Texas, New York, or Montana as you were Minneapolis, Minnetrista, or Maple Grove. But residents here, unlike those of those farther-flung locations, were able to call General Mills their hometown company.

Cookbooks like this – in addition to being a font of inspiration for your next dinner party – provide insights into daily life and changing American culture. Betty Crocker’s Pie and Pastry Cookbook was first published in 1968, joining 11 other cookbooks on the General Mills cookbook shelf. The company had observed many changes since the first Betty Crocker cookbook was published in 1950. According to an interview in the 1968 Minneapolis Journal, some of these highlights included:

More women worked outside of the home

More Americans traveled, both domestically and internationally

Americans were increasingly interested in outdoor life, including camping and barbeques

People had more free time, as well as a greater interest in trying new foods

More Americans were increasingly cooking with wine

Betty Crocker’s Pie & Pastry Cookbook retailed for $2.95. Contents included holiday staples such as the “Old Fashioned Pumpkin Pie” shown above, as well as a cheeseburger pie, grasshopper pie, jam tartlets, and a wide variety of other sweet and savory pies and pastries. The recipes in this and other Betty Crocker cookbooks were tested and developed in the General Mills company kitchens in Golden Valley.

What about you? Do you have Betty Crocker memories? Favorite pie recipes, past or present? Please share your memories in the comment section below.

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In the early years of airline flights, flight costs were prohibitively expensive for many Americans. In order to cater to wealthy customers, airlines wanted to create an environment where people felt lavished, complete with beautiful female attendants. It was after World War II, when Northwest Airlines, based out of Minneapolis, began flights to Asia over the Pacific that “a new era at the airline was ushered in,” and rigid expectations were placed on their flight attendants. Anne Billingsley Kerr, who worked for the airline from 1956 to 1960, when she was forced to retire because of her marriage, remembered:

“Back in the Dark Ages, the requirements were you had to be 21, not over 31, you had to be between 5’4” and 5’8”, you had to have weight in proportion to height, we were weighed periodically to be sure. We had to have 20/20 vision and there had to be no obvious flaws. I even hate to say it, but that was the way that it was.”

Cheryl Ullyot, who donated her stewardess uniforms to Hennepin History Museum, was 20 years old when Northwest Airlines, then called “Northwest Orient Airlines,” hired her in 1969. Like Kerr, Ullyot reminisced about the many regulations for stewardesses’ appearances, writing, “A chip in my nail polish or a run in my nylons meant a dock in pay.” They were expected to wear skirts and high heels at all times for a ladylike appearance.

There were good and bad aspects of being a stewardess. It was a chance to see the world and to meet exciting passengers aboard. “It was a glamorous job,” said Ullyot, “I loved going to work because I never knew whom I might meet.” Fay Kulenkamp, who worked with Northwest from 1968 to 2004, was able to help her parents travel despite the expensive prices of flights. Kulenkamp said, “I thought it would be really nice for my parents to use my passes and take some trips that they ordinarily would not be able to afford.” My aunt, Pam Gunderson, formerly Fredrickson, remembers meeting comedian Bob Hope and actor Georgie Jessel during her time as a flight attendant. But memorable passengers were not always celebrities. “I started at NWA in 1969 during the war in Vietnam and had many soldiers on flights,” Pam wrote, saying:

“One young man had lost both legs in the war and was going home to see his fiancé. I asked him if he wanted a wheelchair to deplane, but he said he wanted his fiancé to see the whole truth right away. I had to duck into the cockpit because I couldn’t watch him struggle. I have often wondered what became of him and the others who flew home with us.”

In the end, the benefits of being a flight attendant were not enough to overshadow the discrimination women faced at Northwest and other airlines. My aunt Pam had left Northwest Airlines by the time of the Laffey v. Northwest lawsuit in 1973. According to Kathleen Barry, in her book Femininity in Flight: A History of Flight Attendants, the lawsuit was “the broadest yet against airline bias.” The case detailed how women were kept from being promoted, received unequal benefits, and of course, the many restrictions placed on acceptable age and appearance. Even the title “stewardess,” it seems, was one that suggested women’s jobs were somehow different than male “flight service attendants.”

Northwest Airlines survived the Laffey case, and eventually merged with Delta in 2010. Today, while women still struggle to receive equal pay at jobs all across the country, we still regard much of the treatment of early female flight attendants as unfair and extreme. While being a stewardess was considered to be a glamorous job in the eyes of some, glamor did not outweigh the changes that needed to be made.

Written by HHM intern Caitlin Crowley. Caitlin is a current Augsburg student where she is majoring in history with a Medieval History minor. She comes to HHM through the Minnesota Historical Society’s ACTC extern program.

Sources

Cheryl Ullyot, “Random thoughts,” Hennepin History, Winter 2006, 3.

Kathleen Barry, Femininity in Flight: A History of Flight Attendants, Duke University Press, 2007, 170.

In 1959, a 19-year-old University of Minnesota student finally got his first gigs playing his guitar and singing the tunes he wrote himself—and for which he would later win a Nobel Prize for Poetry.

Bob Dylan sat in this simple chair at The Ten O’Clock Scholar coffeehouse during those gigs. Though he was only at the U of M from 1959 to 1961, Dylan and local legend John Koerner played together there, nurturing each other’s love of folk and blues.

The Scholar was located at the corner of Fifth Street and Fourteeth Avenue in Dinkytown, a historic student neighborhood adjacent to the University of Minnesota. The décor at the Scholar was simple: small chairs and tables where people gathered to talk, listen to music, or read. The building was burned to the ground in the late 1960s.

If you’ve been in downtown Minneapolis recently, say anytime after 1970, you likely recognize this iconic building as the music club First Avenue. From its opening in 1937 until 1968, however, this art deco building, located on the corner of First Avenue and 7th Street, was home to the Northland-Greyhound bus station. The station relocated in 1968, and a year later the building was converted into a music venue. First called the Depot, then Sam’s, the building became First Avenue in 1981, a name it has retained ever since.